Compaq Portable III
My Compaq Portable III (added to my collection in 1998)
- 80286 – 12mhz
- 1.5MB RAM (640k onboard, 1mb on AST SixPak ISA card)
- 40GB HD (OnTrack BIOS Overlay)
- 3.5″ 1.44MB Floppy (1/3 height from Pentium II era Compaq-Deskpro)
- 3com 10Base-T ISA Ethernet card
- 2400bps internal modem
- MS-DOS 6.22, MS-NET 3, Windows 3.1, MS-Word 2.0
The insulation on the keyboard cables tends to crack and flake off, You can see in the last two photos that I’ve replaced the keyboard cable with an AT Keyboard extender cable. I cut one end off the extender and soldered it to the keyboard.
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- Front view
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- Installing MS-NET
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- Side view
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- Close up drive bay and ISA bay
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- Installing MS Word
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- About MS-Word 2
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- About Windows 3.1
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- Keyboard cable replaced
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- Keyboard cable replaced, old taped up cable shown.
Hello I am also restoring a portable iii. Can you share any details on the keyboard replacement and how you matched the wires? Thank you!
I bought a coiled AT keyboard extension off ebay and clipped one end off (though you could also rob the cable off an AT keyboard, but that just seemed wrong). I used a multimeter in continuity/beep mode to figure out which wire went to which pin on it, then I did the same with the stock keyboard cable and matched them up.